Author Archives: Scott C. Lemon

About Scott C. Lemon

I'm a techno futurist, interested in all aspects of humanity, sociology, community, identity, and technology. While we are all approaching the Singularity, I'm just having fun effecting the outcomes of the future!

Entering a dark age of innovation?

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My friend Dave Cline sent me this link to a New Scientist article titled Entering a dark age of innovation.
As I have been following this space of accelerating change for some
time now, I have to say that I am not in agreement with much of the
analysis presented by Jonathan Huebner. The best comment that I
saw was by Ray Kurzweil who stated:

But artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil – who formulated the
aforementioned law – thinks Huebner has got it all wrong. “He uses an arbitrary
list of about 7000 events that have no basis as a measure of innovation. If one
uses arbitrary measures, the results will not be meaningful.”

I believe that it goes even beyond this … his measurements using
population make a gross assumption about segmentations in
population. He seems to feel that raw numbers on global
population growth should somehow be mirrored by innovation. This,
IMHO, confuses the genetic basis of equality in human design, with the
environment and community within which to create what would be
recognized as “modern innovation”. With so much third world
population growth, I do not believe that you can expect to see a
proportional amount of “modern” innovation.

I am constantly reminded by this when I watch Link TV and see programs like this one about Peanuts … and the fact that in this country a simple peanut sheller can make a huge difference in their life. Likewise in this program, River of Sand,
I was amazing to be reminded of the daily life of these people … and
is Huebner trying to say that they are expected to create their
proportional amount of measureable innovation??

I believe that what we are seeing is more of what is called the “great
divide” … the “haves and have nots” … the continuing division of
those who are leveraging the tools of the modern world, and those who
have little immediate requirement or ability to access them.

As I was reminded this last weekend, all people are “created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” For a
huge portion of the worlds population this has nothing to do with
modern innovation.

Getting Mozilla on OpenDarwin

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I’m now using WindowMaker as my window manager, and starting to install
some other applications.  A browser would be nice … so I used
Darwinports to install Mozilla, but it was still running this morning
trying to build the thing.

I then remembered that I could maybe go and grab an RPM from here.  I’m downloading the Mozilla RPM now and will give it a try later today.

GoBinder SDK … Alpha Code

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Things are starting to heat up here at Agilix Labs as the GoBinder SDK
is now reaching good Alpha stages.  I just installed the first cut
of the GoBinder SDK (build 931) on my Virtual PC Windows XP machine …
and it’s up and running!

The core functionality is there and working, and we even have the first
sample “File System Sync Provider” in place to test with.  I’m now
beginning the process of writing my own plug-ins … as a test of the
new platform, and my own skills!  🙂

It’s cool to see things coming along nicely, and we’ll soon have some
developer forums in place for the SDK.  I’m also going to be
looking for some developers who want to join an “early release” program
and beta test our SDK.  We’re looking for .NET developers who want
to create some cool plug-ins for our product launch later this
year.  If you are interested, send me an e-mail:  scott.lemon
[at] agilix.com

Firepoll … get cash with the right identity!

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Some friends of mine have created a very cool new start-up called
Firepoll.  It’s like combining Instant Messaging with Surveys
… and you get paid for it!  Well … if you have the right
identity.

What they created is a small IM-like service that you install on your
machine.  You then register with their server, and they ask you a
lot of identity/profile information.  All of this is stored at
their server.  Companies interested in doing market research can
then visit the Firepoll web site and subscribe to do “Instant
Surveys”.  Through a web page they select all of the attributes of
the target market that they are interested in surveying, and in
real-time they can see how many of “those” people are currently
on-line.  They can then design their survey through their browser,
and select which “rewards” they are offering for completed surveys.

Lastly, they indicate how many survey results they want and when they
post the survey it is sent – instantly – to all of the on-line
community members who match the profile that was defined.  As soon
as enough people have replied, the survey is closed.

As a user of Firepoll, I have it running on my machine all of the
time.  When a survey is created, where I match the demographic
profile requested, I get a small pop-up message on my machine. 
When I click the message my browser is launched directly to the survey,
and the first question is “Which reward do you want?”  I can get
things like MP3 music, $1 to my PayPal account, discount coupons,
etc.  I then proceed to answer the survey questions, and then post
my results.  I get an e-mail with my reward notification in
minutes.  The entire process is a clean and simple experience.

To me, this is a facinating solution for a number of reasons …
combining many facets of the Internet into one powerful solution that
really leverages the power of distributed networks.  On top of
that, I can leverage my identity – or the one that I define and create
– to actually generate money.

It’s a cool product … I’d love to hear feedback from others on what they think of it!

The Apple Tablet PC doesn’t appear to be real

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Ok … so the TabletPCBuzz post about getting Apple software to run on
a Tablet were false … the author has no real evidence to prove
it.  Bummer.

On the other hand I *did* get OpenDarwin running on Virtual PC 2004 …
that is the same kernel and libraries that forms the base for
OS-X.  I even got a better window manager working this
morning.  So at least *some* Apple software is runnable on a
Tablet PC!

WindowMaker is working on OpenDarwin!

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During the night last night, Darwinports completed the download and installation of WindowMaker and all of it’s dependancies … my first experience at something other than twm on OpenDarwin.

I had to do a quick update to my .xinitrc file in my home directory, changing it to:

#!/bin/sh
exec wmaker

… and then run ‘startx’ … and it all came up working!  Very cool … now I’m going to see about grabbing KDE!

Alternate Window Managers

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I was looking for an alternate window manager for OpenDarwin. 
I’ve been using twm and it is just too minimal for me.  I started
to see if I could get Gnome from Darwinports, but the installation
failed when trying to install Perl 5.8 … which I already have.

I started to look at AfterStep, and then saw mention of WindowMaker in
an article that claimed a complete successful installation using
Darwinports.  So I started the installation hours ago and it is
slowly bringing down the various dependancies, building, and installing
them.  I’m going to give this a try … and then I found a few
alternate directions.

One thing that I hadn’t thought of is that the KDE environment is
‘stronger’ in this market with the Apple use of KDE components. 
I’ll see what I can do with KDE, after I complete my experiment with
WindowMaker.

Documenting my progress

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I spent time today working on OpenDarwin again. Now that I have
a working network driver, it’s a lot more fun! I can now start to
download and install a wide range of Open Source to make it a more
complete and usable system.

One thing that I’ve been doing is spending some of the time documenting the work that I am doing to the OpenDarwin Wiki. They are running a copy of the MediaWiki
and I have to admit that I am very impressed with the
functionality. I’m just learning the interface and capabilities,
but it appears to be a very rich wiki with a lot of
functionality. I ended up writing this page today on Installing OpenDarwin x86 on Virtual PC 2004. I still have a lot to add, but it’s a good start.

I’m going to see if I can complete my CD ROM image tonight that will
contain the network driver and some other tools. I’m still
working through some details. I’ll keep documenting.